Learning Ruby on Rails

Rails has been the popular framework for generating web applications for a long time now, yet I’ve managed to avoid learning it until this month. However a new job gave me an opportunity to dig in and learn it.

Having come from several years of Python/Django development learning Rails shouldn’t have been difficult. Ruby has a comparable feature set to Python and both Django and Rails frameworks perform the same roles. Yet the transition to Rails has proven to be more confusing than I expected.

Perhaps the biggest thing having come from the Python world is that the belief in python is to make all code explicit and reduce the amount of “magic” that happens. Rails on the other hand is all about magic. declarations in models can affect how pages render and there are many.

I have yet to find a good resource for discovering what is available in my namespace.

The biggest thing I haven’t yet wrapped my head around is the declarative nature of the code. The problem with that is that it doesn’t leverage my existing knowledge of HTML/CSS/SQL and instead starts over. As a result the learning curve is steeper than I expected. The fast pace of development of the rails framework itself leaves documentation and online help confusing for new developers to follow.